Slick nudged Bo in the ribs. “Damn, son, that thing’s bigger’n you.”

“Not quite,” Bo said. “I’ve put on some winter weight. Still, it’s big enough to make this fight suck some ass.”

“How do you want to do this?” Slick asked. “I want to make sure you’ve got plenty of room to fight.”

“You don’t want to help?” Jenny asked with a grin on her face.

“I don’t want to get in Bo’s way once he swings that cleaver,” Slick said. “Damned near trashed my whole rig fighting some chicken wings.”

“That’s what you get for living in a place with walls made of cardboard,” Bo said. “Enough yammering. We need to deal with this carrion. There’s another mess I’ve got to clean up after this one.”

Slick and Jenny both gave Bo sideways glances, but decided they could wait to find out what else Bo had on his plate.

“What do you need us to do?” Jenny asked.

Bo wasn’t comfortable with the way this was going down. He’d only tried to help the other barbecue pitmasters, but now they were looking to him for leadership. He was twenty-four years old, never went to college, and couldn’t lead himself out of trouble, much less anyone else.

But he had a deck of magic cards. That gave him an edge, and he thought he knew how to use it.

“You two are on door duty,” Bo said. “When I give you the word, yank ‘em both open. Then grab a weapon and go to work.”

Jenny pulled up the hem of her T-shirt to reveal the cocobolo handle of the finest chef’s knife Bo had ever laid eyes on. Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars her YouTube channel pulled in every year, Jenny had hung on to that knife since she was old enough to hold it without chopping off her fingers. Her grandpa had told her he’d picked the thing up in Japan during the World War II. He also claimed the knife was the only kitchen blade ever made by the famous smith, Hattori Hanzo, and that the knife could cut through a man’s soul. That was all probably bullshit, but it was a damned fine knife.

“What about the rest of us?” An older man, his shoulders stooped from too many years loading lump into a smoker, stepped forward. He leaned on a heavy-handed ash shovel, its blade dented and smeared red. “I’ve spanked more’n my share of meat in my life. Don’t see a reason to stop now. Plus, I think your daddy would roll over in his grave if he found out Hank Stephens had left you to fight a pig carcass all on your lonesome.”

“Come on up,” Bo said. “Thanks for volunteering, Hank.”

A half-dozen other men and women stepped forward after that. More would have, but there wasn’t enough room for anyone else near the unit. Bo didn’t need anymore folks getting in each other’s way.

“When I give the word,” Bo said to Jenny and Slick, “you yank those doors open. And when the rest of you hear me shout, you smash on this thing as if your lives depended on it. Because they probably do.”

To Bo’s surprise, the rest of the folks who’d survived the night so far gathered in a semicircle behind him and the other front-line fighters. It made his heart swell with pride. Because no one there, not even him, was a born fighter. They were doing the right thing, because it was the right thing to do.

“Open her up,” Bo said.

The hog carrion must have been waiting on the other side of the doors with bated breath. As soon as Jenny pulled the lock open, the critter exploded out of the cooler. Its explosive exit threw the doors wide open, knocking both Slick and Jenny flat on their asses with outraged shouts of surprise and pain.

The creature howled as it emerged from the cold, though that was flatly impossible. The butcher had split the thing’s body from snout to sack, and not a lick of guts remained inside its carcass.

“This hex is mine,” the thing shouted as it landed a foot shy of Bo.

“Nope,” Bo replied.

The cards shimmered to life as he took a moment to weigh his options. A pre-emptive strike with Carnivore’s Cleaver was good, but probably wouldn’t be enough to take down a critter of this size. Hackstorm would be useful against hordes of smaller creatures, but was weak against a single target. The last card, Danger Spice, was just the ticket, though.

Bo activated the Danger Spice and Cleaver cards, putting both points of his Strength mana into the attack, and time rushed on at its usual pace.

Grains of glowing salt and crimson flakes of sizzling pepper shot out of Bo’s hand and into the possessed porker’s peepers. The power worked like a charm, despite that the thing had no eyes to speak of. Bo had taken to calling effects like this “Pure Friggin’ Magic” and PFM had become a well-loved acronym by those who fought beside him that night.

The second card kicked off, and Bo cocked the cleaver back over his shoulder with both hands wrapped tight around its sturdy handle. He brought the weapon down between the thing’s watering eye sockets with a meaty crunch and shouted, “NOW!”

The cleaver buried itself deep in the carrion’s brain, and Bo only glanced at the message informing him of the attack’s success and the serious wound he’d inflicted on the hog carrion. He’d gotten so used to the messages he scarcely noticed them, especially once he’d realized he could go back through and look at any of them whenever he wanted.

Hank and the rest of the crew went to work on the dazed pig. The shovel scraped a massive glob of fatty meat out of the critter’s flank, and all the other kitchen implements did honest work, too. By the time Bo had wrenched his cleaver out of the thing’s skull and the deck dealt him a new hand, the pig was on its last legs.

The deck only coughed up two cards in this hand, because it had to shuffle after using all the cards. Metamorph and Severance were the only two cards he hadn’t used yet that night. The first of them was useless as near as Bo could tell, at least for the moment. That it was a rare card annoyed him every time it popped up, and he hoped he’d have a chance to use it after he gained more cards.

Bo activated the Severance card, and the brutal attack split the porcine carrion’s head all the way back to the neck.

The crowd cheered, and Bo felt hands slapping him on the back and heard the congratulations wash over him. It wasn’t the same as winning the competition would have been, but he reckoned his old man would still be proud of his son.

While everyone celebrated, Bo checked the messages that had popped up after his victory. The first one was pretty neat.

CRITICAL HIT. YOU HAVE ACQUIRED 1 MEAT!

Meat

Type: Consumable

Activate: 1 Constitution

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Generate: --

Power: 1

Gobble this down to heal POW wound levels. Meat cannot be restored. Adds five seconds to dealing time per meat consumed.

Rarity: Uncommon

CONSUMABLE CARD, MEAT, ADDED TO PERSONAL INVENTORY

The second was nice to know, even if he’d lost a third of his crypt coins to a brutal interest rate.

CHALLENGE: PROTECT YOUR OWN COMPLETE!

One insight token has been added to your personal inventory!

300 crypt coins have been added to your personal inventory!

As a courtesy for you, local champion of the Red River Casino hex, we have deducted 100 crypt coins to pre-emptively cover interest charges for your debt.

END CHALLENGE ANNOUNCEMENT

The last one, though, reminded Bo he still had a lot to worry about.

WARNING

ONLY THIRTY MINUTES REMAIN TO COMPLETE STOP THE DEVOURING DEVILS! FAILURE TO COMPLETE THIS CHALLENGE WILL CAUSE YOUR IMMEDIATE TERMINATION.

END WARNING

Worrying wouldn’t solve any of his problems, though. Like it or not, fate, the universe, or some perverse alien asshole with a sick sense of humor, had charged Bo with protecting this place and its people on pain of death.

“Thank you for all your help, folks,” Bo said. “I’ll be back soon. Got another mess to clean up.”

Jenny stepped up and put a hand on Bo’s arm. “You don’t have to do it all by yourself,” she said. “I’ll go with you. Slick will, too.”

“I don’t need you volunteering me,” Slick said to Jenny.

“No one’s going anywhere,” Bo said. “I need you and Slick to do some stuff while I’m gone.”

“What do you need?” Jenny asked, clearly convinced she was going along with Bo no matter what he said.

“A lot went down here tonight,” Bo said. “I need you to organize these folks. Find anyone who’s hurt and patch them up. Look for fires, too, because God only knows how many smokers and grills got kicked over in all this mess. Burning down the countryside won’t help anyone.”

“He’s right,” Slick said, cutting off Jenny’s argument before it began. “People might need our help. I know Gertrude’s up there at the other site. We need to check on her, for sure.”

Bo gave Slick a grateful nod. “I’ll be back before any of you know it. This won’t take long at all to sort out.”

He took off before anyone could say another word, long legs eating up the distance back to his campsite.

Bo felt uneasy slipping into this leadership role, but he didn’t have time to fret about that just then. If he hadn’t given Jenny something more pressing to do than chase him around, she’d have insisted on coming with him, and he couldn’t have that. What he had in mind was too dangerous to involve anyone else. It was too dangerous for him, too, but sitting this one out wasn’t an option. He’d definitely die if he didn’t solve this mess, and only might die if he actually carried through with his suicidal plan.

That made the choice simple to make.

As Bo tromped across the blood-soaked ground, he tried to make some sense of the night’s events. He’d clung to the hope that this was some sort of hallucination brought on by his father’s death and the stress of crooked debt collectors breathing down his neck. But it was far too real, and involved far too many people, for that to be the case.

He didn’t believe in ghosts and other woo-woo crap like that, and hadn’t been to church since his mother passed on. As far as Bo was concerned, the supernatural was just crap adults told kids to keep them in line. Like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, but with way worse attitudes.

Lots of folks Bo knew believed in crazy government conspiracies. Space lasers, mind-control drugs in the water, machines that changed the weather. He knew that some of those same people would think this was a government experiment. Bo wished he could believe the government was competent enough for any of that, but he’d seen too much evidence to the contrary. No, this was definitely not some deep state game theory ultra-secret project.

All that left, as far as Bo could tell, was aliens.

This was some freaky UFO business. Bo had seen Men in Black. He knew aliens could do all kinds of weird crap. They’d beamed the messages into Bo’s head from their spaceships, and the cards were some kind of freaky advanced science. He didn’t know why the aliens had picked him out of all the people in the area, but he’d seen alien abduction movies. Those UFO nutbags just grabbed folks at random and poked them in the butt.

The good news, as far as Bo was concerned, was that he didn’t see any UFOs in the sky. Maybe the meat massacre had shown the bastards that humans weren’t pushovers and scared them off.

Or maybe they’d just retreated to come up with a new scheme to wreck him.

When Bo reached his campsite, he had twenty-three minutes left to stop the invasion gate. The directions to it were vague, but the only thing of interest down that way was the bridge that crossed the Red River.

Bo freed the propane cylinder on the back of his food truck from the connection that fed gas to the propane fry rig inside the mobile kitchen. He used bungee cords from the truck’s tool box to secure the cylinder in the pickup’s bed, then he hustled to the still-smoldering smoker to load the aluminum ash bucket with live coals. He hooked more bungee cords through the bucket’s wire handle to keep it from sliding around in the bed.

With two of the three most important pieces of this insane plan in place, Bo hopped into the pickup’s cab to make sure the third was where he’d left it. While the other barbecue competitors were some of the nicest and most helpful people the pitmaster knew, there were a lot more people out on the roads than his fellow pitmasters.

And some of them were very dangerous.

The 1911 Commander Bo’s father had left behind was safely nestled in a vehicle safe under the driver’s seat, along with a pair of loaded magazines. Bo liberated the weapon, loaded it, double-checked to be sure the safety was engaged, then placed it on the seat beside him. With his harebrained plan’s implements at the ready, Bo took off out of the campgrounds like his tail was on fire and he had gunpowder in his pants.

With the streetlights out, Bo almost missed the turn onto the highway from the campground’s dusty gravel road. He cursed and yanked the wheel hard to steer the pickup across the median and onto the highway. He instinctively looked in his rearview for the flashing bubble lights of a police cruiser, then shook his head. If there were cops out here, they had a lot more worries than his driving.

For the first time that he could remember, Bo saw no headlights on the highway, and didn’t hear any other traffic. And while backup generators, or something, kept the casino’s lights on in the rearview, Bo saw zero other signs of life.

At least, no human life.

There were things moving out in the shadows cast by his headlights. One of them was bulky, like a buffalo, but so big he saw the hump of its back over the top of a hill. Misshapen, man-sized figures flitted through the trees beside the highway, fast enough to keep up with Bo’s truck. Then there were the idiotic rabbits with horns on their heads that tried to rush across the highway and, instead, charged right under the wheels of the truck.

Bo winced at the meaty thumps rattling against the truck’s undercarriage. He was sure that not one jackalope—because he’d seen enough Texas souvenir post cards to recognize the furry freaks—had survived their encounter with a few tons of rolling Ford. A glance in his rearview showed Bo he’d been wrong about that.

A single jackalope stood on its hind legs in the middle of the highway, its front arms raised triumphantly in the air. It was PFM the thing had survived his close encounter with the truck. To that furry twerp, Bo must have seemed like the UFO that had wiped out his whole family.

“You go, little guy,” Bo said. It was good to see something surviving this night, even if it was a jackalope so stupid it had charged under the wheels of a truck running at highway speeds.

That was when a Christmas tree’s worth of lights appeared on the dashboard. The truck lost power immediately. Bo guessed a jackalope had gotten a horn into something vital to the truck’s survival, but he didn’t have time to figure it out. He prayed and stood on the gas, hoping against hope he could limp the truck to the top of the next hill. From there, he could throw the truck into neutral and coast down to the bridge.

Otherwise, he’d have to lug the propane and the ash bucket the rest of the way and he wasn’t sure he’d reach the bridge in time.

“Come on, you beautiful thing,” Bo whispered, rubbing one hand on the dash.

The truck responded with a sudden burst of speed.

And then the engine died.

There was nothing for Bo to do but throw the truck into neutral, hang on tight, and hope he’d crest the hilltop. The mortally wounded truck was twenty feet from his goal when black smoke erupted from beneath the hood and gravity dragged its speed down to a crawl. The pitmaster muttered dark threats against all of jackalope-kind as the truck shuddered, hoping that sheer force of will would push the truck up the last stretch of hill.

Dense, choking smoke poured into the cab through the vents. Bo stabbed at the power window buttons, but there was no response.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and slammed his elbow through the driver’s side window. That helped some, but he was still blind and choking. The truck hadn’t caught fire yet, which was a small blessing, but it moved at a glacial pace and Bo couldn’t tell how close he was to the top of the hill.

He held his breath for three long seconds.

The truck rolled to a stop.

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